The Screengrab : mandingo

In Other Blogs: Sex and Slavery Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The blogosphere takes on Sex and the City this week, wrestling with the big questions like: Am I Neanderthal knuckledragger if I refuse to see this movie? And if I am, do I care? At Some Came Running Glenn Kenny made an offhand comment, expressing glee at having no professional obligation to see the film. This remark was taken by some as sexist snobbery, a charge Kenny responds to thusly: “When one puts it that way, it’s tough to answer, as the sexism charge only creates a feedback loop, as reverse-sexism charges are leveled at the movie’s depiction of its male characters, and nobody goes home happy. (Incidentally, I should point out here that as of this writing, I still have yet to see the Sex and the City movie.) It’s the snobbism charge, or rather my own personal reaction to the snobbism charge, that I found interesting. My own personal reaction being, ‘So what?’ Not only ‘so what,’ but ‘fuck that noise,’ because, I’m entitled to pull out the snob card every now and again, am I not? Just because something is a putative pop culture phenomenon I’m automatically expected to give it some respect?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson offers no apologies. “Summer's here and the time is right for fart, diarrhea and masturbation jokes in the theaters. Not just in raunchy male-oriented comedies, but in so-called ‘chick flicks’ -- the ones groups of women attend after a few cocktails. I'm speaking, of course, about Sex and the City. Could it, perhaps, be the long-awaited Judd Apatow(ish) movie for gals? You know, the one about a group of friends who hang out and get drunk or stoned, complain about their relationships (or lack thereof), make dirty scatalogical jokes, and generally prefer one another's company to that of the opposite sex? You tell me. Because, sadly, nobody has enough money to pay me to go see Sex and the City. I am not the target audience and I know that. I have no objection to it, either. As Roger Ebert succinctly stated at the top of his review ‘I am not the person to review this movie.’ Me, too. I am also not that person.”

Mandingo is just out on DVD, and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule offers a reconsideration. “The reviews were so dismissive that by the time the movie resurfaced during the age of VHS it had developed a reputation as some sort of abomination, a camp classic, a shameful artistic disaster. I wasn’t even sure if I could rely on my own memories of the film to be accurate, shaded as they were by circumstances under which I first saw it (I was 15 years old and in the company of my paternal grandmother!) and my uncertainty as to whether those negative reviews might be right…I sincerely hope that with the release of Mandingo on DVD that some revisionism regarding its status as a “so-bad-it’s-good” camp classic will begin to take place. Those IMDb comments from viewers who have seen it recently certainly seem to suggest that there a movement in this direction already underway. When I saw the movie at the American Cinematheque early last year, it was easy to sense that the audience came primed to giggle at the antiquated, period-authentic dialogue, the impolitic slurs and the debased folk mythology that makes up the worldview of Mandingo’s white characters. But it was heartening to hear that nervous giggling die down after about 15 minutes when it became clear that the movie was no corny sex-and-slavery romp, was no easy candidate for Mystery Science Theater-type derision, but instead a serious and agonized attempt to grapple with a period in American history that it seemed was still too hot to handle.”

Adam Sandler: Republican Actor? That’s the contention of Eric Kohn at Cinematical. “Sandler's movies often embrace idealized notions of blue collar lifestyles. In Little Nicky, which Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman found ‘gross, but awash in family values,’ the devil's son is expected to replace his father, akin to the dilemma facing Billy Madison. The simplified correlation between family and work, a dated model of Norman Rockwell proportions, comes up in the blossoming fatherhood plot of Big Daddy and the stress of a demanding job in Click. The dynamic gets even more complicated with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a movie about two straight guys disgusted by homosexuality. You could say the film eventually approves of gay marriage, but it does so with notable reluctance.”

And finally this week in List-o-Mania, Cracked offers 8 Classic Movie Robots That Actually Suck at Their Job. We expect the inclusion of R2-D2 to spur great controversy. “Everyone loves good old R2. From the first time some witty scribe made a joke about him looking just like a garbage can back in the '70s, right up to today, he's one of cinema's favorite robots…On the other hand, we're not 100 percent sure what R2-D2 is good at.”

Reviving Richard Fleischer: "Violent Saturday" and "Mandingo"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The director Richard Fleischer, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 89, had a long career, an immaculate bloodline (as the son and nephew of Max and Dave Fleischer, the animators behind the great short films starring Betty Boop, Superman, and Popeye), and no critical reputation to speak of. Fleischer's vast filmography is all over the map in terms of subject matter and style, and his name is attached to a number of big commercial disasters (Dr. Dolittle, Tora! Tora! Tora!) and minor embarassments (Che!, an attempt by 20th-Century Fox to cash in on '60s revolutionary youth, starring Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro; The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond, with Laurence Olivier as his chagrinned poppa; Red Sonja with Brigitte Nielsen) that are unified mainly by their lack of personality. But he's begun to attract defenders, and Dave Kehr, for one, thinks it's surprising that he "still has not been given a major New York retrospective." As it happens, three of Fleisher's movies are enjoying return engagements on the New York revival circuit in the days and weeks to come. Violent Saturday (1955), which plays for a week at Film Forum starting February 29, is one of those odd film noirs where the thugs from the city hit the highway and track their mud all over the clean, open fields of the American heartland. Written by Sidney Boehm, who also did the script for The Big Heat, it serves up Lee Marvin as the nastiest of a trio of bank robbers who impose their bad morals and worse manners on a quiet little town where they may fit in a little than the locals want to admit. It was made the same year as James Sturges' better-known rural thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, where Marvin and Ernest Borgnine both served as muscle for the local forces of darkness. Borgnine is in this one, too, but cast against type as an Amish farmer who has understandable cause to worry that his religious proscription against violence may not be strong enough to survive its encounter with Lee Marvin. The film, which enjoyed a brief period of revival and acclaim in the mid-80s when it was discovered by critics and used as a club against Peter Weir's tonier Witness, is a reminder of how well Fleischer's no-frills filmmaking technique worked when applied to simple but gimmicky thriller material, as in the 1952 The Narrow Margin and Armored Car Robbery, both testaments to the grip of nuts-and-bolts noir and the nut-cracking sturdiness of Charles McGraw's jawline.

The "Film Comments Selects" series at Walter Reade Theater is showing Fleischer's 1971 10 Rillington Place on February 21 and 24, thus giving audiences the chance to see the director of Gandhi, Richard Attenborough, sweat up the screen as a serial killer who strangled eight women and left it to an innocent fellow played by John Hurt to be hanged in his place. But the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here may be the chance to see the 1975 Mandingo (screening on February 23) on a big screen, assuming that no one tears it down before the closing credits roll. This anti-Gone with the Wind, set on a Southern slave-breeding plantation presided over by James Mason, was made in 1975 from a script by Norman Wexler, the ad executive turned wild man screenwriter who wrote Joe and Serpico. (Wexler, who reportedly served as a model for Andy Kaufman's loathsome lounge-singer character Tony Clifton, was notorious for such stunts as blowing off a man trying to make conversation with him on a commercial airplane flight by telling him that he was on his way to assassinate President Nixon. Wexler's seatmate notified a flight attendant, who in turn notified the FBI, and when the plane landed, Wexler wound up having to talk to a lot of people he would rather have not talked to.)

Kehr takes the position that "Mandingo is Fleischer’s last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." This is a very interesting take on the picture, though some will feel that it may amount to putting a little too much thought into a movie that climaxes with Perry King reacting to the news that his wife (Susan George) has been having an affair with his prize slave, played by the heavyweight champ Ken Norton--King finds out the hard way, after his wife has given birth--by sticking Norton into a boiling cauldron and jabbing him with a pitchfork. But however seriously you end up taking Mandingo, it's definitely one of a kind, and very entertaining, if you can handle the fact that Eric Cartman would question its political correctness. (I remember that it was briefly on rotation on HBO around the time that my high school buddies first got cable, and for a long time, they were much taken with King's line, "I fancied her, so I bought her! She's gonna be my bed wench!" I can promise you, however, that use of this line in the real world got them no action whatsoever.) Devotees of hambone turns will want to see it just for the great James Mason drawling his lines, sitting with his bare feet on a black kid's tummy (it's supposed to be good for the arthritis), and generally giving the kind of performance that gives one visions of the star constantly asking the director, "Now, that last take, you're just going to show it for laughs at the wrap party and then burn the negative, right?" There was actually a sort of sequel to Mandingo called Drum, and it had a script that Wexler had worked on and a cast headed by Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Yaphet Kotto, who you might think would raise the stakes a bit from Perry King, Susan George, and Ken Norton, but it had none of the, um, magic of the original, and is beloved by no one. Fleischer didn't direct it. So maybe he's some kind of auteur after all.

Fleisch And Blood

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

It's often difficult to know exactly what it takes to qualify someone for the title of 'major American filmmaker', other than the obvious qualifications of being an American. Some people, like Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick, get the nod for quality despite a major lack of quantity; others will never reach that status despite prodigious output because they're pure hacks. But there are a few whose status is forever in dispute due to wild inconsistency; although there aren't many filmmakers whose reputation is mixed because they have such vast catalogues that it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, it does happen on occasion. And if anyone qualifies for such a debate, it's Richard Fleischer.

Fleischer — son of the legendary animator Max Fleischer — made dozens of movies prior to his death two years ago. Some of them were terrific (Compulsion, The Narrow Margin, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea); some were awful (Conan the Destroyer, Blind Terror, The Jazz Singer); and some are downright (Mandingo). In a New York Times profile, Dave Kehr looks at his curious career, his obsession with mass murderers (which resulted in films that, by and large, are nothing like what we've come to expect from serial-killer movies), and his excellent, well-crafted sense of decay and social slippage. It's a long-overdue critical assessment of a director whose great work has been lost in an equal amount of dross.

The Rep Report (February 14-21)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable annual treat, the "Film Comment Selects" series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (February 14-28) gives the writers and editors of that magazine a chance to decorate the screen of the Walter Reade Theater with a wide-ranging selection of films, new and old, that they love a lot more than the U.S. distribution business does. There are new films by George A. Romero (the opening night selection, Diary of the Dead), Jacques Rivette (The Duchess of Langeais, to be shown with the actress Jeanne Balibar in attendance), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop), Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate), Lukas Moodyson (Container), and Alex Cox (The Searchers 2.0). The weird revivals include Cox's 1987 Walker, Crispin Glover's 1992 Rubin and Ed, and a couple of Richard Fleischer movies, the 1971 English true crime story 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough, and the mind-boggling 1975 Southern slave-owners' potboiler Mandingo.

"Milos Forman: A Retrospective" (February 14-28) at the Museum of Modern Art covers the expatriate director's career from his early, attention-getting work (Loves of a Blonde, The Firemen's Ball), traces his American work from the 1971 Taking Off to his finding a groove as a respected Hollywood pro (from the Academy Award-winning smash One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt); it also includes some items from off the beaten tracks, such as his contributions to the omnibus films Visions of 8 and I Miss Sonja Henie.

CHICAGO: For one week starting February 15, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a new print of Jean-Luc Godard's exploration of youth culture, revolutionary leftist politics, and bright, shiny primary colors, La Chinoise (1967). This is an important film in the career of a major director and a unique experience on its own terms, and it's never been available on home video in this country, and it doesn't get out to play very often, so I'd advise the curious to brave whatever disaster-movie weather you have to brave to make it to the theater.